December 20, 1946

[ 4:45 pm Cloudy 36°F ]

FRIDAY AFTERNOON in the universe — Broadway and 44th Street. That’s Hector’s Cafeteria where the kids are enjoying an enchanted meal after arriving from North Platte — a four day bus ride. They tracked an early winter storm all the way east from Sidney, Nebraska. As a matter of fact New York City was just about to get its first snow of the season. A Marcel Proust impersonator strolls uptown—stage right. An anonymous Negro pedestrian pauses midstride at the curb waiting for an empty bus to pass. Joan Vollmer Adams with the day’s papers thoroughly read and now tucked under her arm crosses the southbound side of Broadway preoccupied and bemused in a Benzedrine inflected reverie. She’s well dressed and poised but slightly wired and cerebrally wanton. She spys a couple of high school girls searching their pocketbooks for change. Further uptown, Allen Ginsberg has just returned to his East Harlem apartment from the Museum of Natural History where he and William Burroughs have been inspecting the Mayan Codices after shooting junk together for the past six days. The week before Allen had confessed to Lucien Carr that he was ‘in fact queer.’ “So that’s the set-up” was Lucien’s response. Allen now scribbles in his journal—